Sep 26
Friday, September 26th, 2008
If you thought your wireless network was too remote or obscure to find, you might want to think again. There’s a non-trivial chance that the name of your network and its precise geographic coordinates are already mapped out and searchable by anyone with a Web browser. At least for U.S.-based networks, probably the best place to find that information is at the free database maintained by Wigle.net. The Wireless Geographic Logging Engine is a Web site that maps data gathered by “wardrivers,” geeks who enjoy cruising around with open laptops connected to global positioning system (GPS) devices in order to chart the distribution of wireless networks. WiGLE’s database allows anyone to search for a wireless network by geographic area or by the name of the service set identifier (SSID), the moniker either manually or otherwise automatically assigned to all wireless access points. Wireless routers broadcast their SSIDs as a [...]
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Sep 26
Friday, September 26th, 2008
How the transport bods silenced security researchers
The annual DEFCON conference in Las Vegas in early August got a bit more interesting than usual when three graduate students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were enjoined from giving a presentation by a court in Boston.…
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Sep 26
Friday, September 26th, 2008
Apple on Wednesday issued an update that plugs at least two dozen security holes in the version of Java that runs on Mac OS X systems. Mozilla also pushed out patches to correct a number of security and stability issues with its latest version of the Firefox Web browser. By my count, Apple’s Java updates address 24 separate security flaws in its implementation of Java. The majority of these flaws were fixed in security updates that Sun Microsystems has been shipping since April, but Apple maintains its own version of Java and is responsible for managing those updates for OS X systems. The Java update is slightly different depending on whether you’re an OS X 10.4 (Tiger) or 10.5 (Leopard) user. Either way, the Java patch is available through Software Update or directly from Apple Downloads. Firefox is configured to install all updates automatically (after the browser is closed [...]
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